The Chicago Project for Violence Prevention

The Chicago Project for Violence Prevention is an umbrella
organization with two primary goals:

1. To work with community and government partners to reduce violence in all forms.
2. To help design interventions to be included in a community or city anti-violence program.

The Chicago Project works with community, city, county, state, and federal partners to reduce violence in Chicago and in other communities in Illinois and throughout the nation. Begun in 1995, the Chicago Project has built the infrastructure for community-level participation, community-government partnership, and for the development of new roles for all partners, emphasizing community capacity building, community organization, faith leadership, and police participation. The Chicago Project is housed at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CeaseFire

The Chicago Project has designed and tested a new intervention — CeaseFire — that approaches violence in a fundamentally different way than other violence reduction efforts. CeaseFire works with community-based organizations and focuses on street-level outreach, conflict mediation, and the changing of community norms to reduce violence, particularly shootings.

CeaseFire relies on highly trained outreach workers and violence interrupters, faith leaders, and other community leaders to intervene in conflicts, or potential conflicts, and promote alternatives to violence. CeaseFire also involves cooperation with police and it depends heavily on a strong public education campaign to instill in people the message that shootings and violence are not acceptable. Finally, it calls for the strengthening of communities so they have the capacity to exercise informal social control and to mobilize forces -- from businesses to faith leaders, residents and others -- so they all work in concert to reverse the epidemic of violence that has been with us for too long.

These activities are organized into CeaseFire's five core components, which address both the community and those individuals who are most at risk of involvement in a shooting or killing:

• Street-level outreach
• Public education
• Community mobilization
• Faith leader involvement
• Police participation

 

Read more on the Mission and History of the Chicago Project and CeaseFire.